The exchange said it was under order not to pay its debts and apologized to users “for causing so much inconvenience.” Its liabilities far outweighed its assets. In fact, Mt. Gox wasn’t even sure how many Bitcoins had vanished.

A Mt. Gox help line wasn’t very helpful to some people who were trying to call in yesterday, Bloomberg reported.

Yesterday, in a Bitcoin chat room, a user named nanashi____ surfaced with word of a 20 GB file representing sensitive data of an undisclosed nature that Mt. Gox stored. Apparently, people hacked in to Mt. Gox and were trying to figure out what to do with the data.

Also over the weekend, someone posted some curious code on the text-pasting website Pastebin. It seems to be from Mt. Gox’s back end, and it seems to contain a means to route Bitcoins to places where they aren’t supposed to end up. At least that’s the way Ars Technica is writing about the code.

A class-action suit is being organized against Mt. Gox’s chief executive, Mark Karpeles, to recover the Bitcoins that went missing in the apparent hack, Bitcoin news outlet CoinDesk reported today.

Mt. Gox became a Bitcoin exchange in 2010, and a hack in 2011 resulted in the loss of $8.75 million, according to a Wired article on the evolution of the site.

During all the tumult, Bitcoin prices haven’t dropped off, believe it or not. At one point on February 25, the price sat at $452.22; and earlier today, it hit $656.20, the highest point since Valentine’s Day, according to CoinDesk data.

Even so, the dismantling of a major Bitcoin exchange should serve as a yellow flag for anyone thinking about buying, selling, or mining the digital currency. Clearly these systems can get sabotaged, and the lack of insurance means no there’s no guarantee to get your money back.

More information:

CoinDesk is the world leader in news, prices and information on bitcoin and other digital currencies. We cover news and analysis on the trends, price movements, technologies, companies and people in the bitcoin and digital currency wor... read more »

Mt.Gox is the world’s largest and most established Bitcoin exchange that facilitates the trade of Bitcoin for local currencies around the world, quickly and securely. All Mt.Gox customers have at least two sub-accounts: one for Bitco... read more »